Blogs: Teaching

I know from personal experience how much an undergraduate research experience can shape your future.
At the end of my junior year in undergrad at Swarthmore College, I was struggling with the idea of what to do after college and how my major (physics, at the time) would help me achieve that....

When you think of things a graduate student might do to relieve stress, baking and assembling 90 whoopie pies probably doesn't make the cut.
Here’s the scene: every surface of my apartment is covered in misshapen disks of chocolate cake. I plop fluffy whipped cream onto the disks and sandwich them...

What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word “radioactive”?
For many people, this word conjures up images of ominously glowing material. In the opening credits to The Simpsons, a running gag is Homer's mishandling of a glowing green bar of radioactive material.
As someone who works...

Every November, I join a planning team of graduate students, postdocs, and the Office of the Dean for Graduate Education to offer a two-day workshop called Path of Professorship (PoP) for MIT’s graduate and postdoctoral women considering careers in academia... Read more at the Slice of MIT.

In March 2016, world champion Go player Lee Sedol was defeated by the computer program AlphaGo in a five-game match. As someone who doesn’t play Go, follow professional Go, or study computer science, this shouldn't have been a big...

Survival of the fittest. A succinct, elegant tenant of life—and perhaps the most famous words to be uttered in all biology. Uttered by whom, though?
You might be surprised to learn it wasn’t Charles Darwin. It was Herbert Spencer, an English philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist.
Spencer...

There are few things more intimidating than standing in front of an MIT classroom after your very first semester, preparing to lecture on topics you just finished learning about.
I was in this situation during my first IAP (Independent Activities Period). I had been dreading the thought of teaching...